Iowa State: Intramurals and Foster’s first win

One of the things that made Iowa State great when I was there was intramurals. The shirts awarded to champions weren’t available anywhere else and none of the t-shirt stores would duplicate them for you (I know someone who asked). The shirts there were *FAR* better than the designs other schools offered–I can assure you the ones from Ohio State were CHEAP…total synthetic, single color. I still have an OSU one around somewhere simply because of its FUGLINESS.

But this is about Iowa State…and that generally means Foster House. Foster was not known for its athletic prowess…gee, an ‘academic’ floor filled with engineers…shocking. We didn’t have Jeff Hornacek hitting cleanup on our softball team or walkons from the football team picking up rebounds on our basketball teams. Did the floor have success? Sure–mostly individual stuff like Reggie who was into power-lifting…things like that. Team sports though….no.

Now, we weren’t winless–because you got to play several games before going to the playoffs. But basically, the first round of the playoff bracket was the end. If it was double-elimination, then the SECOND playoff game was the end regardless of the sport…or if it was co-ed. Foster on the team…it’s gonna suck.

So the first playoff win by a team sport on Foster…well, it happened in a way that only Foster would do.

Intramural team names at the college level can be interesting (better than fantasy sports names). In most places, students have free run to name their teams anything as long as it doesn’t directly involve profanity or bigotry. That’s how you get names out there like “The Hung and the Breastless” (co-ed), “We Bang Your Mama’s Boards” (men’s bball), or “Our Bats Will Crush Your Balls” (co-ed softball), or “We Score Between Your Mama’s Uprights” (men’s soccer). You get the idea. It was critical, if you weren’t going to win the game, you NEEDED a great name.

–>If you remember great names from your own intramural past…by all means put them here.

This would be a common topic before signing a team up and lead to long discussions in the floor lounge at night or at lunch or dinner. The thing is–as you can see from the examples above–many of the names have insinuated sexuality…most of the others involved various other body functions. I wish I could remember who brought it up…it may have been me, it could have been any of 20+ guys truthfully, but someone wondered if we had an opportunity to get away with something.

Oh my…a chance to pimp the system? Hell yes. And thus, a Foster basketball team became: ( BYE )

Yeah–nothing fun about that. I get that. That wasn’t the intent. You see, when you’re playing your pre-tournament games, you don’t pay attention to anything. The start times are always the same, so it is just show up and play whoever’s on the schedule (or ‘get smeared’ if you’re a Foster team). But when you get to the tournament bracket, now you have different start times–and depending on the sport, you may need to stay and play back-to-back. The bracket has all the team names listed on there, so you can follow what’s going on. Understand?

Well–that means for our first round match, the bracket looked like ______( BLANK )_______ 6pm \_________________________ / ____I FELTA THI_____

So…you’re on I Felta Thi….what do you wind up doing that night if you know the winner’s next game isn’t until two days later?

That’s right…because you’re playing ( BLANK ), you don’t show–because there’s no team against you that night….you’ve got a *BYE* And when they don’t show…Foster claims its first ever victory in a post-season intramural team tournament!!

Needless to say in real life–the team we SHOULD have played was NOT happy…oh, wait…did I mention that if you no-show, you have to pay a forfeit fee? No. Well…oh, well. We got out win–because the name had been accepted and we’d played with it all tournament, but after that, the Rec Department changed its rules regarding team names and went through them with a fine-toothed comb…not to get rid of the sex, just to avoid a competitive advantage from a name.

*** I went looking for an image of the cool championship shirts we got. Unfortunately, sometime in the last 20 years, they changed designs. Now you get one that looks like these. Ugh…disappointing that they got ugly.

modern ISU shirts